Over the Waterfall
(Photographed by Mark Eilbeck)
Over the Waterfall August 14, 2002, Unknown Source
A vale of mystery surrounded Philly native Lisa Lopes' short life. Her family speaks out publicly for the first time about the strange circumstances of her death.
When Lisa Lopes, star of the hip-hop/R&B trio TLC, arrived in Honduras--a small, impoverished Central American nation wedged between Guatemala and El Salvador--it was 100 degrees and it was only late March.
The sun was beating down on the 13 concrete huts in herbalist Dr. Sebi's Usha Healing Village, a compound at the base of flourishing green hills near the town of Jutiapa. But the smothering heat was a welcome respite for the 30-year-old Philadelphian, who'd overcome the turbulence of her upbringing to become a Grammy Award-winning recording artist. Honduras represented an escape from hangers-on, abusive relationships, constant turmoil and a nagging sense of loss that she'd been carrying for more than a decade.
"She was just looking for something different to do with her life," says her 51-year-old mother, Wanda Coleman. "She had been drinking all the time. She wasn't happy. She would have blackouts, didn't know what was happening. She said she had a split personality. I don't know if I believe it, but she said she would be another person."
For three years Lopes--a generous free spirit who gave even when there was nothing left--found refuge in the place she referred to as "the bush." Usha Village's electric therapy, thermal baths, natural saunas and herb compounds offered physical and emotional healing, not only from the rigors of fame, but from the haunting memories of her past and a grave premonition of her future.
In Honduras, she fasted and devoured books on Christianity, Buddhism and spiritual communication. She consumed herbs that she believed took her to a higher spiritual plane. She told those close to her that she communicated with the spirit of her father, the late Ronald Lopes Sr., whose 1991 murder haunted her.
But in the midst of the physical cleansing that transformed her, giving her a peace that sometimes showed through in her face, Lisa had dreams and portents. Not the least of which, according to those who knew her best, was a premonition of her own death.
"WHEN WE WERE IN HONDURAS, me and Lisa had a chance to take a ride by ourselves," says her brother, Ronald Lopes, who traveled there with Lisa, their sister Raina and a number of others, including a four member-singing group called Egypt that Lisa was mentoring.
"She was telling me about a dream she had," recalls her brother. "It was two lions that bit off two heads. And she told me that she thought something was going to happen on this trip. But she felt that it was going to be one of the girls in Egypt. Two of them are Leos and two of them are Geminis. She said she felt as though it's inevitable that something was going to happen."
Two weeks into the visit something did.
Lopes and other members of her entourage left the Usha Healing Village in a car driven by her assistant, Stephanie Patterson. That evening, according to those who were there, the stifling Honduran air was filled with foreboding.
Ronald sensed it while watching vultures devour a horse's carcass and a flock of birds making shrill, screaming noises from the trees. Lisa's cousin, Jasmine Brodie, felt it in the very walls of the huts where they were staying.
"The air out there was thick," says Brodie. "We were staying where people who were sick went to get well. They would take the herbs to get better, and if they didn't get better they died there. A few people died in the room, and when I was in the room, I felt them ... 'Haunted' is a pretty strong word. But I would say there were spirits in the room."
Brodie says she could feel their presence, not just in the huts, but in the air. It made her uncomfortable and afraid, and eventually caused her to make an early return to the States on April 13.
But not before the night of the first accident.
IT WAS DARK WHEN THE CAR DRIVEN BY Lopes' assistant left the village. It's commonplace for people to walk the roads that wind through Honduras, and it's often difficult to see pedestrians. When a family crossed the road in front of their car, there was the thud of a little boy's body slamming against the vehicle.
Lopes' party stopped and found the boy critically wounded. They loaded him into the car, and Lisa, ever the caretaker, cradled the dying boy's bleeding head in her arms. Someone gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation as they rushed him to a nearby hospital. Once there, someone called back to the Usha Healing Village to speak with Ronald.
"They said, 'We hit a little boy,'" he says. "Then they told me he was on life support. And then the next day he died. It was a shock."
The surname of the boy's family--Lopez.
Lisa--exhibiting the generosity that her family says was both her blessing and her curse--paid for the boy's medical care and funeral. And though her assistant was never charged with any wrongdoing, Lopes later compensated the family for their loss. She returned to Usha wearing the evidence of what she'd been through.
"Lisa had blood all over her shirt when she came back," says her cousin Jasmine Brodie. "She kept the boy's shoes and brought them into the kitchen and sat them on a chair and took pictures of them with the video camera. Then she told us what happened."
The members of her entourage listened in shocked silence, not knowing the boy's death would be a strange harbinger of things to come.
ON APRIL 25, JUST WEEKS AFTER BEING told of the fatal accident on a nearby Honduran road, Ronald Lopes found himself looking into the blood-stained, tear-streaked face of his sister Raina, who'd just been driven back to Usha from another accident scene.
"I asked Raina if everybody was all right, and she said, 'I don't know,'" Ronald recalls. "I asked about Lisa, and she said, 'I don't know.' When she said, 'I don't know,' something came over me, and something told me that something really bad had happened."
As Ronald jumped into a waiting vehicle and was driven to the accident scene, he recalled Lisa's strange behavior that day.
He'd wondered why she had worn all white in the morning, then changed to all black in the evening, pacing before she'd gotten into the SUV. When he got out of the car and saw his sister's body, he believed that Lisa--who was driving at the time of the accident--had known she was going to die.
Once at the accident scene, he unleashed a profanity-laced tirade, jumping up and down and screaming before a sense of calm took hold. He reached down and cradled his sister in his arms, just as she had cradled the little boy weeks before.
As he put his hands into her mouth in an effort to clear her airway, her body stiffened. He held her as they drove to a nearby hospital, knowing there was nothing more he could do.
"One thing I'll never forget is the feeling of having my sister's arms go cold in my hands," he says. "The hospital was like a 10-minute ride. And by the time we got to the hospital, her body was cold."
Thirty-one years earlier, nearly half a continent away from the Honduran road where she died, Lisa Lopes was born in Philadelphia's Naval Hospital.
"I was in a lot of pain ... I had a hard time dilating," says her mother, Wanda Coleman, of the day Lisa was born. "They had to break my water and they gave me a saddle block--that's when they put a needle in the lower part of your spine and it numbs you. Eventually, they pulled her out with tongs."
Even on that day, her mother and father--who met while attending Germantown and Gratz high schools respectively--experienced many of the same problems that would plague their 13 years of on-again-off-again marriage.
Wanda says Lisa's father, an Army soldier, arrived at the hospital drunk and carrying artificial flowers. "After that I was pretty much raising Lisa on my own, with him spending--just wasting--a lot of the money. It got to the point where I had to work and pay rent because he wasn't bringing the money home, and I had to file for an allotment from his pay."
As Lisa's father's drinking worsened, the marital problems escalated. Coleman says he beat her, sometimes in front of Lisa and later in front of her younger siblings. When the beatings would start, Wanda and the children would leave to stay with her father, Jose Andino, and his wife, Eva.
In between, Wanda says, her husband often bought alcohol and drugs with money that should have paid for rent or food. He sometimes left the small family stranded and penniless on military bases when he shipped out on deployments.
Once, the fighting got the family evicted from base housing in Fort Dix, N.J. And the violent spats sometimes involved other family members.
Wanda says Ronald Lopes' mother, Gladys Chaneyfield, would become part of the disputes. And Ronald's sister, Karen Fequa, once broke a window at the family's house in an effort to defend her brother. Another time Wanda's father had to intercede when a brother-in-law threatened to beat her.
Fequa says her brother was not an abusive brute, but admits there may have been some physical confrontations.
Asked how the chaos at home impacted the children, Lisa's brother says it affected them all in different ways.
"My father made me afraid of him, which kind of put me in a shell for a good portion of my life," he says. "With Lisa it was different. She always expressed herself and felt strongly about what she believed in ... I admired her because at that point I couldn't do that. I was too scared of my father."
When Lisa was 10, her parents separated. Wanda took the children and moved to Florida. There was a divorce, and Wanda returned to Philadelphia. Soon after, Ronald Sr. was stabbed in a dispute and nearly died.
One of the first people he wanted to see was his ex-wife. She initially didn't want to see him, but eventually relented. A year later the two remarried, Wanda says, because she believed things would be different.
"He said he [became a Christian]. He got saved ... But he pretty much did not change. The fighting started, him being like a very dogmatic person. His mother got involved again. It was mainly his mother."
By the time Lisa was 13, she was living with her paternal grandmother--an arrangement her mother opposed. Wanda says her husband wouldn't allow her to go and get her daughter.
"He took me up in the bedroom and said, 'Lisa and my mother have a bond, and Lisa asked me if she could stay around there, and I told her yeah.'
"I said, 'What? What are you talking about, 'bond?' What do you mean, 'bond?'
"He wouldn't let me out of the room, so we ended up in a fight," says Wanda. "And I jumped out the window. It was a window like that over there [about the height of a porch]. It was like 11 o'clock at night and it was raining. I ran barefoot around to my grandmother's house, where she used to live at that time. I was just boo-hooing ... all I could do was cry. Wrap my arms around my grandmom and cry."
After that night Lisa was shuttled between relatives for the remainder of her teenage years, dropping out of high school and eventually earning a G.E.D. Though she did live with her mother again for several short stints, Wanda kicked her out for being "disrespectful," and her grandmother, Gladys Chaneyfield, later did the same.
"She lived with me prior to going to Atlanta," says her aunt, Karen Fequa. "She used to dance onstage at a club called Second Cousins. They would have rappers and beatboxes and talent shows or whatever, and she tried out for someone's video. This singer named Lorenzo. She was picked to dance in his video. Lisa left Philly to go to Atlanta with Lorenzo, and they got screwed out of some money. They were left down there with nothing."'
Lorenzo and his manager wanted to come back to Philadelphia. Lisa decided to stay. She became involved with an early version of the group TLC (the group later replaced an original member with Rozonda Thomas). As the group's members took nicknames that began with the letters T-L-C, Lisa chose Left Eye, explaining that a guy once told her he was attracted to her left eye. Through an Atlanta hairdresser, they met Pebbles--a singer-turned-manager who signed the group to a management deal.
"That day, in January 1991, she left the meeting with Pebbles and was thinking that she was going to buy Mommy and Daddy a house," says Fequa. "Then she said to herself, 'Well, I'm going to buy Mommy a house and then I'm going to buy Daddy a house, 'cause Mommy and Daddy can't live together.' But as she was celebrating, she gets home and gets word that Daddy was killed."
Five months earlier Ronald Lopes Sr. had relocated to a house in Kinston, N.C., that had been left to his paternal grandmother's heirs. He was there to try to work things out, his sister says. He wanted to make changes. But a cousin was already living in the house, and the two argued frequently.
"He was shot in the stomach," says Wanda, who got the news soon after it happened. "I think some people came by and heard the shots, but it still took them a while to get there. I think he died on the way to the hospital.
"I called and told Lisa. And she said, 'Oh what?' I don't know if she cried. She didn't cry on the phone. She seemed really calm."
But inwardly Lisa was devastated.
"Part of the reason was that so much of him was in her," says her brother Ronald. "Some of his wild side was in her. His spirituality was in her, his curiosity for finding out things was in her and his musical talent was in her. She always felt like my dad could kick anybody's ass. She felt protected when he was around."
Some relatives privately speculate that Lisa was looking for that kind of security in her often disastrous relationships with men. Even as TLC's CDs, OOoooooHHH ... On the TLC Tip (1992), CrazySexyCool (1994) and the triple platinum Fanmail (1999) took off, Lisa was both looking for a father figure and emulating what she'd seen in her parents' relationship.
Though she told relatives that she had been romantically involved with numerous celebrities, including Keith Sweat and later Marion "Suge" Knight, it was her link with former Atlanta Falcons wide receiver Andre Rison that most resembled her parents' failed marriage.
"Both men had controlling mothers, both relationships had experiences of domestic violence and both relationships were negatively affected by outside influences," says her aunt, LaVeta Jones. "And the outside influence, I would say, was family. I don't think Andre's mother liked Lisa. She spoke negatively of her. And his mother also controlled his money. Both relationships were marked by infidelity.
"I believe that Lisa's parents' relationship greatly influenced her choices, in that she did not know what a healthy relationship was and may have even thought that violence and strife were par for the course."
In 1993 Rison allegedly pulled a gun when someone tried to break up a fight he and Lisa were having. Nine months later, after another fight, Lisa put some of Rison's possessions into the bathroom sink, doused them with nail polish remover and burned them.
She then found some of his sneakers and put them in the bathtub and burned them. In the chaos that followed, some of Rison's friends searched for a fire extinguisher while others vandalized Lisa's car, says Lisa's uncle, fashion designer Kyle Young, who witnessed the fracas. Meanwhile, the flames spread, and Rison's house was engulfed.
Her family insists that Lisa did not purposely burn Rison's house to the ground and that the media made the story into something it wasn't. In a plea bargain, Lisa pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a halfway house, five years probation and a $10,000 fine.
Though their on-again-off-again relationship was allegedly marred by abuse, Lisa still helped pay Rison's debt when he fell thousands of dollars behind in child support payments. And in 2001 the two planned to be married--a move that family members opposed.
"A person who's abusive doesn't stop," says a relative who asked not to be identified. "They buy you something nice and they apologize. Some people, they see that growing up and they say, 'That's how it is.' And some people see it and say, 'I don't want to be the same way.' It just depends on what kind of person you are. Some people confuse love with abuse. If he hits me, he really loves me because he was jealous because I did this with so and so. I'm not saying that's how Lisa was, but some people are like that."
Lisa, the relative says, liked thugs--men who could exert power and control over others. And because she was so short, at 5 feet 2 inches, she wanted a big man whom she felt could protect her.
That was her attraction to the man who embodied power and control, Tha Row Records CEO Suge Knight. Knight once oversaw the careers of Snoop Dogg and the late Tupac Shakur, and he took over the label and changed its name from Death Row to Tha Row after a messy breakup with former partner Dr. Dre.
"Lisa had a dream about [Suge Knight]," says Jasmine Brodie, the 20-year-old cousin who accompanied her to Honduras. "She had a dream he was looking for her. As soon as he got out of jail [where he served five years on charges stemming from a 1996 assault], one of his people contacted her people, and she flew down there. Then she changed her name to N.I.N.A., under his label, Tha Row. N.I.N.A. stands for 'New Identity Not Applicable.' And she recorded some stuff for him."
Relatives were privately worried about her relationship with Knight, whom she was romantically involved with for several months. After Lisa broke up with Knight, she told at least two relatives that the record executive had choked her after she asked him about a large advance for signing with his label.
Despite the allegation, Knight is planning to release some of the music Lisa worked on with Tha Row just months before her death. Her family is not pleased.
In recent years, according to relatives, the music came to matter less to Lisa. She provided money and lodging for people who couldn't--and sometimes wouldn't--care for themselves. She began the process of adopting a girl named Snow whose mother she'd met after the fire at Rison's house.
Snow, like many of the people whom Lisa tried to help, was troubled. She had suffered a rough home life with a mother whose on-and-off addiction had scarred her. And it showed.
Once, say relatives, Lisa took the girl to church. During the service, the girl ran to the front and screamed out that she hated God and everyone in the sanctuary.
Eventually, Lisa returned Snow to her mother.
Other ventures, including a book, a clothing line, a doll line and a documentary began to take priority, along with a relentless search for her father that took her into the spiritual realm.
"I know she really missed him," says Jasmine. "When you're missing something, you're searching for it, and you do things that people think are odd trying to find it. Trying to find happiness, trying to fill the void."
She would sometimes disappear behind closed doors for hours, even days, in an effort to talk to her father's spirit. And sometimes, according to relatives, she believed she succeeded.
"I heard her mention it before, and also I found a letter where she conversed with my father and with Tupac, and wrote down what my father was saying," Ronald says.
"Seeing that made me understand more about why Lisa was fasting and how serious she was about her spirituality. I wish I would have known how deep she was into certain things. I would have spent more time with her. She probably felt as though the rest of the family didn't understand."
In truth, many didn't. Lisa grew up attending Third Eternal Baptist Church in Germantown with her maternal grandparents in a belief system that considers forays into the realm of the dead demonic.
Her father, according to relatives on both sides of the family, didn't have those kinds of reservations. And neither did Lisa.
"She was very spiritual, as was her father," says Lisa's aunt, Karen Fequa. "They both believed in life outside of this physical being. They believed the spirit lives forever, regardless of how, where or if it's housed."
Fequa says both she and Lisa's uncle, Charles Lopes, have had experiences that involved a presence they believed to be that of their dead brother, Ronald.
But when Lisa began to travel to Honduras and to partake of certain herbs and participate in certain practices, some relatives privately wondered if she was dabbling in the occult. Some, her mother included, believed her life was in jeopardy.
Two years before her death, Lisa's mother says she had a vision of her eldest daughter in a casket. She came to believe that Lisa would die young. She didn't know when and didn't know where. But Lisa, who had experienced visions of her own death, believed she knew the exact date.
"She didn't have it right," Wanda says. "I think as time went on, I don't think she entertained the thought anymore and she started to plan things again the last several months. She thought that since it didn't happen at the time, she thought it wasn't going to happen. And I kinda thought that, too."
Just months before the fatal accident in Honduras, Lisa began a 40-day fast, and her mother fasted with her.
"I fasted for intercessory prayer for her," Wanda says.
She pauses, then talks about how God cushioned the blow by revealing what was going to happen. Still, she says, when the accident did happen, it was eerie and sad and spiritual.
"It was like I heard that crash," says Wanda, who was at home in Georgia at the time. "That crash was in my kitchen. But I couldn't relate it to anything. I just was wondering what that loud screeching noise was. I looked behind me to see if anything fell off the counter or anything moved. I was in the house by myself, so it was quiet. I heard this big screeching crash and I said, 'What was that noise?' Nothing was disturbed. But it stayed on my mind. What was that noise? What was that noise?"
When she learned about the accident, Wanda was at once hysterical and calm. Although she'd expected it to happen, the surprise was no less real.
"All of a sudden it's here," she says. "That's the shock. I'm going through this. It actually happened. Lisa's not here anymore. But there was a reason for that. I mean, it's like, the Lord did this for me. I'm supposed to tell other people that he can do this for them. They don't have to suffer. They don't have to be grieved for a long period of time ... It's down in your soul, down in your spirit, that yearning is there. He knows it."
They say death comes in threes. A few months after Lisa's passing, the saying came to fruition. Lisa's uncle Anthony Lopes--a disabled Vietnam veteran who had followed Lisa to Honduras and remained there, watching over her investments--died on July 17. He joined the little boy who was hit by the car and Lisa as the third one connected to die in Honduras in a span of three months.
"Anthony lived in Orlando, Fla., and went back and forth from there to Honduras with Lisa," says Lisa's aunt, Karen Fequa. "The next thing I know, in May of 2000, he went to Honduras and didn't come back."
Initially, Anthony Lopes--Lisa's father's brother--followed the teachings of Dr. Sebi along with Lisa. Weighing some 300 pounds at his arrival, he fasted and ate the herbs that were offered in the village, eventually losing 100 pounds. But he soon stopped following the regimen and regained all the weight, Fequa says.
He died of congestive heart failure.
His death, following so closely on the heels of Lisa's, seemed odd, says Fequa. It was almost as if there was some spiritual element, some connection.
"Both my brother and my niece died in Honduras within months of each other," says Fequa, who believes that the practice of voodoo in Honduras may have had an effect on her family. "It's just a little uncanny.
